


The Moon Is Down

by DarlaBlack



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Episode: s05e14 The Red and the Black, Episode: s05e18 The Pine Bluff Variant, F/M, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-31
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-10-19 16:08:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17604578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarlaBlack/pseuds/DarlaBlack
Summary: After the events of "The Red and the Black," Mulder struggles between faith and truth, between love and quest... but does he have to choose?





	The Moon Is Down

His love was called away by the stars and he followed her to a field of blackened corpses. Her life, he learned, was bound by a sliver of metal: his wild and true thing, harnessed. But she was not among the dead.

He’d spent months telling himself not to believe. Even when she reached to hold his hand across the vast space he’d built between them and cried out in fear, he told himself  _no_. _No, we are alone on this rock. No, you must not love her._ He’d traded his belief for her life, he thought. His love, too. To keep her safe. It was his price.

But after what he’d seen at the Air Force base (a faceless man, an impossible immolation, corroboration of this wild tale of cosmic struggle), he didn’t know what to believe anymore.

In his apartment, dark but for the ambient glow of streetlamps, his fishtank, Mulder stared at his hands and thought what a fool he must be. So easily swayed by what he’d been shown, so eager to claim ownership of this Truth. So lost.

“Mulder.”

He glanced toward her. She was with him in the darkness. Inexplicably, she was with him still. He bit at the cuticle of his thumb and thought of her in that hospital bed, red-cheeked and disoriented. She pulled his hand away and held it in hers.

“Mulder, talk to me.”

HIs forehead crumpled and he shook his head. “I can’t.”

A squeeze of his fingers—so warm, her hands, on this cold February night. Scully rubbed the pad of her thumb across his knuckles. His love, he thought.  _She_  was his love. He could not have traded it away. “You can tell me,” she said, so quiet, she who would swim in the shadows with him for reasons he could not fathom.

“It was your birthday last week,” he said.

She was quiet, but he heard her slow, deep intake of breath.

“I’m sorry.”

“Mulder, you don’t need to be sorry.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “For every single thing.”

She took her hand away, and then for reasons that again he didn’t understand, he felt her arms come around him. She pulled him low, his cheek to her shoulder, and her nails scratched through the hair above the back of his neck, soothing. “You want the truth so badly, Mulder. I know you do. You want to know everything so you can make the right choices. So you can undo some of the evil that’s been done.”

His nose touched the peach-soft skin above her collar bone. She smelled like heaven. He let his hands come to the swell of her hip, to the dip of her spine. Around and around in circles he went, like the snake on her back. How prescient she’d been.

Her lips brushed his neck and he felt something inside himself tremble. “But there’s more to truth than knowledge, Mulder.” Her lips again on his neck, deliberate this time: a kiss. “Can I tell you a truth?”

He lifted his head to look at her in the blue-black dim. Such vulnerability. He cupped her cheek. “Tell me.”

He watched her courage falter for a moment, and then watched her wrangle it back into place. Her brows furrowed. “You’re already good enough,” she told him. “You’re good enough to be loved.”

The tremble became a quake, a heartquake that shook loose his resolve, and he squeezed shut his eyes against its rumbling. No one had ever said such a thing to him. The words concealed a possibility she hadn’t said, but that he wanted to believe nonetheless—that he  _was_  loved.

“Scully,” he said, because it was the only word he could muster.

She curled her hand around his forearm. “And you’re more than the work. You’re more than this fight and what you can know to be fact. You of all people should understand that.”

He breathed deep, let it out slow, lowered his face to touch his forehead to hers. Did he deserve this? Could he let himself love her the way he knew she should be loved? Could anyone? “You deserve more than this,” he said, voice rough, the words touching her lips along with their mingled breath.

“So do you,” she said with fierce eyes that spoke only love, not regret.

He kissed her, then. He ceded to the trembling thing inside him and took her lips with his. She let him. She kissed him back. She touched his neck, gripped his bicep, opened her mouth. She wanted him. When her tongue, sweeping across his lip, made him bold, he slipped his fingers under the hem of her shirt to touch the impossible softness of her skin.

“Is this okay?”

She leaned back on his couch and tugged him with her, nodding as she kissed him again, pulled his hand back under her shirt. He moved with her, hard already against the fly of his jeans and lightheaded with the thought of stripping the smart black suit off her body, of laying her across the cushions and tasting her, making love to her. “If it’s what you want,” she said, hesitating, touching his wrist.

He stilled for a moment. Was it? In this moment, yes. He wanted it more than anything. She was solid and good and beautiful and she made him feel human. She was the fire that burned with him for justice and the cool hand that calmed him. Yet, while she was strong, her heart seemed fragile. And he was clumsy in love. He could be impulsive and thoughtless, single-minded. Surely he would hurt her, he thought, and more pain he could not abide.

“Scully,” he said. “Dana,” and he felt her stiffen slightly at the sound of her own first name. His hand was still on the skin over her ribs, which he soothed with small caresses. He looked at her face, her eyes wide in the dim light, marked a secondary vulnerability. She was afraid already that he would hurt her. He kissed her lips again: a reassurance. “I love you,” he told her. “I want you,” he said. “But I am… very afraid of fucking this up.”

She held his gaze and nodded, ran her fingers through his hair and arched her back so that his hand slid upward toward her breast. “Okay,” she said. “But… don’t you think it’s worth the risk?”

Her faith in him seemed unshakeable. The alternative to failure, he had hardly considered. What would his life be like with this version of Dana Scully in it? One who told him he was worthy of love and  _showed_  him to prove it? What if he, in turn, could make her happy?

Mulder pulled her hand to his lips and kissed her palm, then bent to place another on her mouth. He let his other hand roam beneath her shirt, brushed a knuckle along the underside of her breast and felt her arch toward him. Oh yes, he thought, it might be worth the risk. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, for you. I’ll make it worth it for you.” And he was unbuttoning her clean white blouse, each little  _pop_  a declaration.

He kissed her neck and heard her breath change—he took mental note, a catalogue of responses and pleasures. This hand here. Thumb across the lace over her nipple. Suction at the juncture of her neck and shoulder. He read her like Braille and he would not soon forget its story. He tugged off her clothes, one item at a time: jacket, top, bra, pants… panties. The dark of the room had sapped its color, but she glowed: she was a pale arc like moonlight on his couch. He lay her down across the length of it and kissed her mouth again. She palmed his cheeks, lifted her hips against him. “I want you,” she said.

Oh to be wanted and to want in return. His cock was painfully hard at the sight and feel and taste and smell of her. It was so quiet he could hear his own blood calling for her. His love. “Let me taste you first,” he said, and he watched her eyes go wide. She nodded, swallowed hard, and he dipped his head first to her breast. Her nipples pebbled under his tongue. Her knees gripped his ribs. Her fingers cradled his head.

“Oh, Mulder.” It was a sigh.

Her belly next: quivering soft skin under his mouth, while his fingers dipped lower to find coarse hair, heat, and an unmistakable wet slip. He hummed against the skin of her abdomen. “God, Scully.”

“I told you,” she said, and he looked up to find her smiling, coy. He groaned.

Mulder hooked both hands under her knees and pulled them apart gently. There. Right there, this secret she kept every day, that he hadn’t dare let himself think about. He was going to learn it by heart. He bent to taste, and she let out a long, slow, “ohhh.”

She  _was_  heaven. She bucked and writhed under him, and he had to hold her hips steady with his thumbs. He paused to look at her and her eyes were wild glints among his throw pillows. He circled and dipped. He kissed. Her breath came in shallow hiccups and her fingers slipped into his hair. They caressed, and then they tugged.

“Please,” she said. “Please stop, I want to…”

He lifted his head again, thumbed the moisture from his chin and caught her eyes. “What do you want?” He asked.

Her hips lifted. Her fingers came to cradle his jaw. “I want all of you,” she said, and then she was tugging at his shirt. He helped her shuck his clothes, watched her eyes follow down his body, her breath catching when his boxers slipped to the floor to reveal his aching cock that dipped toward her as if with a mind of its own. She sucked her bottom lip into her mouth and reached for him. Small, deft fingers wrapped around him and his eyes fell shut. She squeezed and stroked, getting to know the weight of him, quickening his breath with a more frantic need.

“Scully…”

He felt her toes at the backs of his thighs, pulling him toward her on the couch. He lay between her knees, which lifted again to grip his waist. His arms came to rest beside her shoulders, and the look on her face made his heart ache. It was ravenous hunger, which he was sure matched his own, but she was also smiling: a bloom of joy at her lips and eyes, a painted swath of high color at her cheeks, desaturated by the dark. He kissed her again while her fingers guided him downward, and they gasped into each other’s mouths when he pushed into her.

It did not take either of them long. His knees dug into the couch and her fists gripped at his shoulder blades and her head turned sideways on the pillow to call out in pleasure as they rocked their hips together and he filled her and she squeezed around him until he couldn’t take one more second of this perfect, perfect pressure. He cried out into the nook of her shoulder and neck, felt the inside of her ripple and clench with her own climactic plunge. He held her under him afterward for a long moment, careful not to press her too firmly into the cushions, face still at her neck and hair, kissing the soft skin behind her ear. Her hands swept over his back in indiscernible patterns.

Eventually, Mulder pulled back to look at her face. She glowed still, the smile tucked subtly into the crease of her eyes. His thumb swept over her reddened cheek. “You,” he said, and her smile blossomed fully.

There were several quiet minutes, then, when he separated from her gingerly, disappeared for a moment, then returned with a warm, wet washcloth. The sight of her on his couch, stretched naked, palm behind her head, gave him pause. Had this really happened? He bent to help her clean up, but couldn’t resist pressing another kiss to her swollen mouth.

She was real, and she kissed him back.

But as the dark wore on and carried them toward a drowsy kind of contemplation, wrapped in throw blankets and tucked into the narrow crease of his sofa, he wondered how real. “What will happen?” He asked.

Scully nuzzled the soft hairs between his pectorals, pressed a small kiss above his left nipple. “We’re still us,” she said. “And we don’t have to…” but she didn’t finish. A line of tension formed between them. Here was where he might hurt her, were he not careful, he realized. Here was a juncture of forking paths.

“I love you,” he reassured her. She didn’t look at him, but nodded against his chest. Terrified of  saying, doing, the wrong thing, he stayed quiet. After a while, he felt her arm go slack at his hip, felt her breathing slow. They drifted. They slept.

Two days later, he made plans to take her out. To do this right. He was reaching for his phone (to call a nice restaurant for reservations—he’d spent two hours debating the best one), when it surprised him by ringing. An anonymous voice demanded a clandestine meeting, some group calling themselves the New Spartans, and suddenly he was wrapped in a tangle of lies and deceptions. He was keeping things from her, avoiding her, against his will. He watched her pulling back from him, tucking her heart back into its walled fortress. Everything inside him screamed that he should tell her the truth.

He couldn’t. It ripped him to shreds, holding her at arm’s length. By the time she knew, the thing which had been so beautiful had become a wound between them, another rift walled off by silence. 

Somehow, even while trying to do right, he had managed to do everything wrong.

 

 


End file.
